The Truth About Building a Big Business as a Mom

The conversation about women, ambition, and family is full of inspirational nonsense. Here’s what it actually looks like to build a big business while raising a family – the hard parts, the unexpected gifts, and what I’d tell myself if I do it again.

Let’s start with the hard parts (buckle up)…

Building Health Coach Institute while raising a daughter basically handed me my ass. 

My life was work-kid-work-kid-work-kid on repeat, my body never fully recovered from pregnancy and childbirth, and for years when my husband asked what I wanted for Mother’s Day, my honest answer was “I want to disappear into a luxury hotel room and take a nap.” (That was after I asked him “who are you again?”)

Before I had my daughter, I approached parenthood like a business, thinking “I’ll just hire help and it will all be ok!”

So when my daughter was a baby, I hired a nanny, a housekeeper, a night nurse and a personal assistant. It cost a small fortune, and it turned out that they all fought with each other! So in addition to being the primary childcare giver and running a business, I got to manage territorial disputes from the people I paid to make my life easier.

When my daughter was older, I had nannies, but guess what? When my daughter was up at 3am with a 104 fever, the nanny wasn’t coming over. When my daughter had to go to the ER for dehydration after puking 20 times, the nanny wasn’t spending 6 hours in the waiting room. 

The hard lesson I learned about building a big business as a mom is something inspirational reels won’t tell you: it will cost you.

Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, financially. 

But, there are unexpected gifts!

Building a big business as a mom made me better. Not in a tidy, Disney way, but in the way that only pressure can shape a person. My mantra in the early years was “Pressure makes the diamond”. And that turned out to be true.

I’m a far more empathetic, insightful and wise person today as a result of this journey, which makes me far more valuable to my clients, many of whom are in the exact same boat. 

Here’s what I tell them (and what I’d tell myself if I build another big business): 

• Clarify your why: When you’re building something big, the why that got you here may not be the why that carries you forward.
• Choose your strategy: Your business model doesn’t have to be all-consuming; the path to what you truly want might be simpler than the one you’re on.
• Create a simple plan: Once you know what you want, the steps to get there become clear.

You will not always get the motherhood-big-business balance right. That’s not failure, that’s reality. The founders who navigate this best aren’t the ones who figured out the “secret formula”. They’re the ones who stopped pretending there was one.

You can build an extraordinary business as a mom! It will cost you something real. And it will give you something priceless you couldn’t have gotten any other way.